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Ronja och Birk...

From the Swedish film based on the child-book "Ronia, The Robber's Daughter" by Astrid Lindgren. On the photo: Hanna Zetterberg Struwe, Ronia in the film, and Dan Håfström, Birk in the film. Click on the picture to go to Astrid Lindgren site.

Vuollerim 6000 years, August 2006

From the openair museum illustrating the early prehistory of Lapland; the Stone Age - very interesting, or?? I was very interested however, tiringly interested in some person's eyes?? :-) A cousin and his little son. Another one of my favorites. Click on the picture to get more information.

The end of September 2006

Me at Mallorca spring 1997.

About me

I was born in Umeå in Västerbotten, Sweden, and moved during childhood stepwise to Skåne in the south, and at last back to just below the middle of Sweden where I still live.
I am educated both as piano-pedagogue and church-musician and have a full time employment as piano-pedagogue. Church-music is side work.
I am interested in a lot of things and will blog about things I read, psychology, society, history, nature, my work too hopefully, and my everyday life… And both in Swedish and English.

Easter 2007

The cottage where mom lives, april 2007. The houses and yard are surrounded by woods on two sides. Walking round the corner you are out right into the nature, almost! Nice! The nature-loving Swedes you know... One of my uncles has constructed this cottage. It was built 1977 I think.

facebook

From the library, December 2006

Angels blowing trumpets.

More about me

I work fulltime. In a fulltime employment we have 67 pupils each week. But if we do other things the amount is reduced. I feel if it shall be fun to play myself I need to play at least 3 hours per day. Then my fingers obey and I can express things better… So I guess you can’t say I am working little. My writing is for myself in first hand; to process and express things. And here I can collect things for myself like in a library. But if people find this blog I would like to share what I read, media I have access to, as for instance teachers papers and pedagogical magazines, how the discussions are in them as the issue school and pedagogy is so big here, and of course I would also like to share music I like and find interesting and think has something to express…

A museum…

Click on the picture to go to the slideshow. Pictures are taken with my cell (mobile) phone camera.

Even more about me

I grew up in the middle-class as the oldest of six siblings coming very close. My dad was educated agronomist and worked as headmaster for agricultural schools the last 25 years of his work-life. And we grew up on agricultural schools. My mom is educated as nurse.Two of my siblings have walked in our dad's path and work as agronomists, the fourth sibling is engineer (college), the fifth occupational therapist (something with which she doesn't work as now) and the youngest is educated from school for Social workers and has a teachers education too.

My political compass

Click on the picture to get to the site where you get your political compass.

Sweden

Where Sweden is located in Europe, and the world. Click on the picture to go to the official gateway to Sweden.

Summerhill

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fredag 6 juli 2007

Needs/behov...

In the middle of doing under-work for painting a big timber house (yes, it is really big it feels!!!) and taking walks and reading I try to write. And, hmmm, I write fairly much. Extremely diligent. Too much?? Have sores on my knuckles and hands of brushing old paint away from the house with a steel-brush. Poor me!!?? And training ache in my whole body, using the whole of it, putting the body-weight on!!?? Working really hard here!?? I wonder if we (me and my youngest brother) are doing it too well?? As we don’t do it so often it takes time I guess?? To paint will be the easiest part of it?? But will take some time too? Not least to paint the windows?

Page 47-50 in the chapter “Emotional needs: essential for survival” and “Collective repression and denial” in the book ”Rediscovering the True Self ” by Ingeborg Bosch:

“It is important to understand that non-material things such as love, respect, physical touch as cuddling and being held, emotional warmth, a perception of safety is necessary for the child’s very survival. In our Western society there is a strong tendency to think that although love, respect, physically affectionate touch, emotional warmth and safety, etc., are important, a lack of such things could not be life-threatening.

Phyllis Davis’ illustrates the essential nature of emotional needs. She reports some terrible facts on early child death: ‘In the beginning of the nineteenths century more than half of all children died in their first year. The illness was called ‘marasmus’, a Greek word, which means ‘wasting away’… (only fifty years ago) the most widely proclaimed method of childcare was based on the advice published in Care and Feeling of Children by Dr. Holt in 1894. Stop any rocking don’t pick the baby up when it cries, feed only at set times according to a schedule, and prevent ‘spoiling’ by picking the baby up unnecessarily outside the necessary feedings and diaper changings, was some of Dr. Holt’s advice /…/

These dogmatic ideas have survived and even today some parents and doctors adhere to this ‘scientific’ way of raising children… It wasn’t until after the WWII that the cause of marasmus or inexplicable infant mortality was researched and a link could be made with a lack of touch. The infant mortality decreased notably in those places that increased the amount of touching of the infants /…/

In the earl fifties people’s eyes started opening up to the fact that infants’ emotional needs are as strong as their need for food, implying that a lack of having these needs met would have severe consequences and eventually lead to death; death by ‘marasmus’. Just as lack of food would eventually lead to death by hunger if this lack were great enough.”

She writes about Harlow’s monkeys and deprivation as another illustration of the importance of emotional needs.

“The results generally indicate that permanent psychological effects can ensue unless adequate substitutes for the mother are provided /…/ Because both heat and food were provided by the surrogate mothers, these satisfactions do not appear to be sufficient to produce normally behaving offsprings. Harlow’s baby monkeys definitely preferred the surrogate mother with a body of terry cloth over sponge to the simpler wire-frame model, although each presented the same heat and food. Apparently the monkey affectional system is dependent upon contact stimulation provided by the terry cloth, which encourages cuddling; here is more to even monkey motherhood than warmth and hunger satisfaction.’

‘Neglect or abuse, lack of attention from an uninterested or self entered parent, and physical punishment all leave damaging traces on the development of the emotional brain, that result in the shaping of life-long emotional characteristics. In childhood, responses to treatment by caregivers take on a fixed pattern in the fundamental synaptic wiring of the neural architecture, and are difficult to change later in life.’

My comment: but recent brain research has shown that the brain has more abilities to recover than we have thought or imagined…

“Lastly, I would like to refer to Robert Prentsky’s research, which also clearly illustrates the enormous impact that follows when emotional needs of the child go unfulfilled. His research shows how the first years of the lives of criminals, guilty of extremely cruel and violent crimes, differed in one way from other criminals who had committed less cruel and violent crimes. The very violent criminals had been sent from foster home to foster home, or they grew up in foundling homes. Their personal history indicated severe emotional neglect and subsequently a very slight chance for adjusting to or bonding with other people in their environment, due to a lack of continuity in relationships.”

My comment: see Jonathan Pincus research about serial murderers too.

“Just as in the case with Harlow’s little monkeys, there is abundant evidence showing that children have strong emotional needs. Children need more than food and physical warmth. Safety, cuddling, love, respect, and nurturing physical contact, etc. during their first years are essential in order to secure survival and healthy emotional development.”

And one has shown that it is possible to help even the worst criminals and incest perpetrators to recover through therapy (group-?), if they get the opportunity to question and see as wrong what they endured one when they grew up and was very small. Even much damaged has been helped and has shown positive results!? But unfortunately there are people that are too damaged…

”Since most of us have had to repress our childhood pain, we are not able to understand what childhood needs really are. Most of us believe that physical needs are the only real survival needs, and that meeting emotional needs is not vital. This is a mistake. In order to survive emotional needs should be met. When they are not, it is only thanks to our ability to repress the truth that our emotional needs will never be met, that we can secure our survival. Since almost all of us have had to do this, our society is in what could be termed a state of collective Repression and Denial of the truth about childhood. As a consequence, the effects this has on individual lives, society, and ultimately the world we live in, are also repressed and denied.”

And these emotional needs are also denied by many so called helpers!??? Or they think it is enough just to talk about it? And this denial is the cause for “contempt for weakness” even among helpers (therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists etc.)?? The helpers are in denial about those needs themselves to a large degree?? They haven’t really understood their importance? And what it causes if a child doesn’t get them met?? Therefore they can behave fairly contemptuously against people with problems and people that doesn’t manage to recover enough rapidly or at least during a certain amount of therapy?? Yes, I am fairly critical…

”The effects of repressing and denying the truth about childhood suffering are manifold. On a global level we see wars, poverty, hunger, environmental pollution fuelled by greed and hatred.”

If we deny our early needs what can happen later in adulthood? What expressions can this denial and repression take? More or less harmful depending on the power we have?? We try to fill them with substitutes?? But substitutes are always substitutes!!?? We try to fill our childhood needs, which can never be filled afterwards (but grieved instead), and don’t live a real adult life to different degrees depending on how damaged we are and how much we have had to repress!?

“On a societal level we see the suffering of millions due to emotional pain, addictions and crime. On a family /individual level we see suffering because so few are able to maintain loving relationships and many are lonely. And then at he end, or beginning of all, there is the child. The child that is born innocently into this word but whom can only survive the pain inflicted on her by repressing the terrible truth. The terrible truth which is hidden within the privacy of the family and the home, and of which so few are aware. And so we allow the destructive cycle to go on and on and on, without knowing that we do so.”

We maybe can’t change the world, but we can maybe change our own lives??